One Year Ago, Trump Called Me an ‘Enemy of the People.’ Rising Costs and Inflation Are the Real Enemy

While most Americans sat down to eat their Thanksgiving meals last year, I was looking forward to a few moments of peace with my family during what had been a chaotic few weeks. Georgia’s county and local elections officials had already counted the ballots in the presidential election twice, including once by hand, and had just started the third and final recount. All three counts affirmed Joe Biden as the winner of Georgia’s presidential contest.

Yet my Thanksgiving was interrupted by news that President Donald Trump had called me an “enemy of the people” purely because I stood up for the integrity of Georgia’s elections. I refused to bend to the pressure and, on America’s day of thanks, this was the thanks I got.

In the year since, a signature audit and numerous investigations into allegations of fraud have turned up nothing. No one has come forward with evidence of any widespread scheme to steal the election. The courts have reaffirmed the results in Georgia time and time again. A year later, I am even firmer in my conviction that Georgia’s elections were accurate and secure.

This reality has not stopped Trump and his supporters from obsessing over an election that Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security called “the most secure in American history.”

And, in doing so, they have failed to focus on the real enemy Americans are facing: inflation, rising costs, and the bad policies that have created them.

Americans are noticing too; this is no high-class problem. Gas prices were at their highest level in seven years, forcing the Biden administration to dip into the strategic petroleum reserve. And to think, only two years ago, America had become a net exporter of oil.

Even the New York Times acknowledged Thanksgiving “could be the most expensive meal in the history of the holiday.” Turkey prices are at an all-time high. Prices for milk and sugar are at the highest in many years as well. According to one estimate, the average American had to spend 15 percent more for this year’s Thanksgiving meal than last year’s.

Overall, inflation is rising at the fastest rate in 30 years, with energy and food costs leading the way.

It is the American people who will suffer the most. Families reuniting perhaps for the first time since the COVID pandemic will have more to worry about this Thanksgiving. Instead of Americans enjoying time with their family and friends, watching football, and just relaxing on the couch, rising costs and rapid inflation that is lowering incomes in real terms will hang like a storm cloud over dinner tables across the country. And while everyone is negatively affected, price increases on gas, food, and other staples hurt the poor and lower-income Americans especially hard.

Unfortunately, the damage to Americans’ bank accounts has done little to dampen the Biden administration’s appetite for more massive government-spending programs. Bottom line, if you print trillions of additional dollars, the value of each dollar goes down. As a result, salaries that don’t increase to match the rise in inflation lose their value.

Conservatives need to do more to push back, as these policies do very real damage to the American families that are struggling to get by.

Before I started in politics, I was a small-business owner. I’ve signed paychecks. I know how rising prices can squeeze the budgets of American workers and the businesses that employ them. Profligate government spending wreaks havoc on the economy and hurts the people who work hard to put food on the table. Inflation chips away at the gains the American people made while trying to recover from an unprecedented pandemic. Bad federal government policy makes progress for the average American all but impossible.

While some on the right remain focused on the last election, liberals in Washington, D.C., are pushing a progressive, inflationary agenda that hurts American workers and businesses. Real conservatives at the state level are focused on counteracting this progressive agenda by cutting unnecessary regulations and red tape so that incomes can rise and costs can come down, lowering taxes so that hard-working Americans can keep more of their money instead of sending it to wasteful D.C. politicians, and passing balanced budgets so that government doesn’t live beyond its means.